Beg, Steal, or Borrow: New Beats From Moscow

So far, all the musicians described above work primarily with instrumentals, save Mujuice, whose output is split between those meticulously crafted soundscapes and highly descriptive lyrical narratives. But the real genesis of this music comes from hip-hop, a musical form that plays with meaning on several levels: acknowledgement of previous forms of music through sampling and recontextualization; colonization of a particular style through clothing, slang and body language; and unique expression of social situations or status through wordplay and rhyming. Transplanting these aesthetics into a Russian landscape opens an enormous serious of semiotic doors, far too many to adequately discuss in anything other than a dissertation. What makes this pertinent to a producer like Lapti, however, is his place in the contemporary world of Russian hip-hop. Kunteynir (pronounced "container"), a group whose place in the Moscow underground is legendary, used Lapti's beats almost exclusively for their masterpiece, an album called Pyat Let ("Five Years").

Kunteynir: Tekhnik (L) and MC Blev (R)

Over beats employing everything from simple piano loops to long, ambient snippets of film soundtracks dotted with loping drum tracks, Kunteynir unravel dark, humorous tales of a Moscow that exists far from the world of touristy statues and stereotypes. Using an interpolation of the Russian language called mat, a form of slang rarely uttered in public and mostly incomprehensible (if not completely forbidden to use) for foreigners, the group mine the same vein as their 90s gangsta-rap predecessors in America: N.W.A., Mobb Deep, the LOX, and Tupac. The stories on the album range from the perverse (the extremely detailed orgy described in "Eto Zhizn", or "That's Life") to the politically charged (on "Ment", a slang word for "cops"), all recorded with a karaoke microphone. The garbled vocals, lo-fi production values, and giddy enthusiasm brings to mind a cross between Guided By Voices and the Beastie Boys: on "Olga Markovna", the lyrics switch between the ultra-serious and the ultra-silly, with the line "Oh, I just had the best fart!" followed swiftly by a verbal attack on Vladimir Putin. These are tales of the street, Moscow-style, but unfortunately, they've been silenced, as Tekhnik, one of the group's MCs, is in jail for drug possession.

"There is no better MC in Russia," Lapti sighs, adding that Tekhnik's arrest is widely believed to be the result of the cops planting drugs on him. "We all miss him, but he'll be out soon enough, and he's already been working on new raps."

While Lil Wayne may have the option of phoning in his verses from jail, such options are a luxury in Russia, so for the time being the Russian-speaking world will have to do with .rar files of the group's work.

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The gear that pushes this hyperactive scene (and that makes a group like Kunteynir available to the world) is, of course, the Internet. While this is nothing new for the rest of the world in the 21st century, the relationship that Russians have with the information superhighway has several unique bends. First and foremost, it's one of the last places in the country where dissent is not only tolerated, but discussed, organized, encouraged, nurtured. As television and print media sink further and further into the realm of compliance ruled by the country's powerful Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, blogs provide an outlet that could not have even been imagined in the days of samizdat, the system of passing banned publications from community to community during the Soviet Union. Journalists in Russia face persecution and, at times, death for investigating corruption that lies too close to the halls of the Kremlin, but there's enough wiggle room online to allow one clever person to create a false Twitter feed for President Dmitry Medvedev that twists the words of his actual tweets into self-mocking bursts of text.

But beyond dissent lies a different symbiosis with the Internet and technology as a whole. While the state of Russian scientific development has fallen into a state that would have been considered shameful in the pioneering days of the Soviet Union, when some of the world's finest mathematicians, physicists, and researchers added to the glory of the Communist Party, what has remained is a fascination with technology coupled with a complete disregard for the concept of intellectual property. Judging from the number of young programmers walking the streets of Moscow, the country's future may very well lie with the power of the information superhighway. But first they'll have to deal with the fact that anything is free to be swiped, copied and sold from the Internet. Multiple online forums trade albums, films and software as soon as they have so much as trickled into the realm of public knowledge. In many of the city's markets, cramped booths reeking of cigarette smoke and illuminated by harsh fluorescent lighting sell bootlegged video games and discs containing the entire Adobe Suite for less than $20. In short, while the cost of living in much of the rest of the city is incredibly high, at least citizens can easily find whatever they want in the form of entertainment online. And the repercussions for independent musicians in the country are massive.

"To be honest, I really like that aspect of it," says Mujuice of the ease with which users can find and download his music. "It's funny, Russia encountered piracy a little bit earlier, that is, before the Internet. And by the time the Internet had appeared around the world, it wasn't a shock for us because no one could have imagined that you would just go to the store and buy an actual album... unless you wanted it for the cover."

The first time I ever met Mujuice, I asked him where he obtained most of the samples embedded in Cool Cool Death's tracks.

"Beg, steal or borrow," he shrugged, uttering a phrase that pretty much sums up a lot of these musicians' view of intellectual property-- it's all there for the taking.

"In general, all these things on the Internet that people call piracy-- more than anything it's a sign of evolution," says DZA. "Music is becoming accessible to everyone. But if you're talking about being able to earn money [as a musician] this way, well, that's a different question."

This type of infrastructure, in which a record label itself is a novelty operation (Pixelord runs one called HyperBoloidthat recently put out the first of a series of cassette releases this year) and record stores are virtually nonexistent, save for a few boutique outlets in Moscow dabbling in very expensive used vinyl, requires musicians to make their money performing, even though a lot of this music is made to be heard with headphones. And sometimes just performing in Russia can be a hurdle in itself.

"The first show I ever played, a guy stuck a gun in my face," says Pixelord, discussing a show he booked as Pixelord that was raided by the police. "They searched everyone, and then after a few hours I was onstage."

"Yeah, every week the cops show up at that place to collect their bribes," Lapti chimes in. "We have so many cops here, more than in all of Europe. And everyone's afraid of them. It's a kind of tsarism."

Next:>The difficulty of playing abroad and exclusive mixes from DZA and Pixelord